Rupert Murdoch Is Having a Meltdown On Twitter

It’s been a busy week for Rupert Murdoch. The annual shareholder meeting for News Corporation, which the octogenarian is CEO of, was held in Los Angeles today. Despite the steady tarnishing of the company’s reputation in the wake of last year’s phone hacking scandal, its share price has grown by some 50 percent in the past twelve months. While some shareholders have been calling for Murdoch to step down, a preliminary vote suggests that they are still backing News Corp.’s board.

Prior to the meeting, Murdoch displayed something of a sharp tongue on his Twitter account, a sign, perhaps, that the stresses of scandals can weigh on even the doughtiest of moguls. Even when you have massive global holdings in traditional media from TV stations, movie studios and newspapers, a free account on an internet site offers freedom of expression like nothing else, especially in a week when, aside from having to address pesky shareholders, it is revealed that a severance deal for your most trusted lieutenant at a now-shuttered tabloid was around £7 million, far in excess of the presumed £1.7 million.

So Murdoch tweeted on October 13, the day after a high court heard that News International (NI), the British newspaper affiliate of News Corp., is facing some 170 more claims for damages for alleged phone hacking.

Singer Church responded to Murdoch that ”It would be decent to withdraw & apologise for calling me, @CharlotteChurch and @jacquihames *scumbags.*” Church and Hames, a former policewoman suing Murdoch, are both members of Hacked Off, an organization lobbying for press reforms.

Murdoch is taken aback by his own meanness.

Having made his less than warm feelings for celebrities clear, Murdoch sought to “back-pedal” his “scumbag” remark, saying on Twitter that he was”not referring to these ladies.” He then went after actor Hugh Grant, another member of Hacked Off who is suing NI for alleged hacking, with a thoroughly ad hominem tweet (which is noted on the Guardian and no longer appears on Murdoch’s Twitter feed):

“They don’t get arrested for indecency on major LA highways! Or abandon love child’s.”

Murdoch can’t help contradicting himself.

While it’s all right for Murdoch himself to engage in ad hominem critique, he encourages others to refrain from such, as he wrote on October 13 in the wake of the vice-presidential debate:

“Next debate Romney needs to ignore personal attacks and pivot to plans for millions of jobs and real opportunity for all. Only that matters.”

The UK kicked him out, Canada won';t let let him open shop there, but the US allows him to run this bizarre TV station FOX Noise. What's up with that? Funny that the GOP buddies up with Murdoch to try to bring back the 50s when the likes of this FOX crew would have been railroaded out of the country for treason and unAmerican activities because they get paid by a foreigner (who lives in a communist country at that) to malign the US government. I wonder if they ever thought about that.